The New York Times
A Quirky Violinist and a Festival to Match
By Zachary Woolfe
Excerpt from review...
On occasion Ms. Kopatchinskaja seemed to favor extremity for its own sake: super-quiets, for example, that drew attention merely to how quiet they were. But there was no such self-consciousness on Saturday afternoon, when she was joined by the pianist Markus Hinterhäuser (taking a weekend off as the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival), in two duos by Ustvolskaya, a Shostakovich pupil who went on to develop a stony style in virtual isolation.
This is music of constant forced transformation: A grinding march suddenly lightens into a lullaby; after that melody, in turn, seems to wander into lethargy, it suddenly snaps back to attention. Then Mr. Hinterhäuser was simply astonishing in an unbroken hour of Ustvolskaya’s six piano sonatas, from the gentle loneliness of the first to the thunderous full-forearm cluster chords of the last. (Ms. Kopatchinskaja was his page turner.)
I won’t soon forget his account of the Fourth Sonata, with a dark undertow that begins inexorably dragging the softly winding melody under. Ustvolskaya was, in this playing, unfailingly grim but never icy or smug. This was human music, to the last — full of intense dignity.